The buying agent loosened the stopper on the scales as Raphael Ngurime's bulging bag of cotton swung from the hook. The 69-year-old farmer looked on as his second harvest of the season was weighed. He didn't know what the agent was doing, only that when the dial came to rest he appeared to have lost 50kg of his crop.

When Ngurime had weighed the cotton seed on the village council scales earlier that morning, it had come to 550kg &#8211; now it was just 500kg. He says this is common. Being cheated by agents &#8211; middlemen who buy farmers' cotton and sell it on to ginneries, where cotton is processed into lint for export &#8211; is one of the many hardships of being a cotton farmer in Tanzania.
Back at home in Sanungi village, where he lives with his daughter and four grandchildren, Ngurime reflects that life would be better "if I was paid for what I harvest".

Around the villages in Tanzania's western cotton growing area, where 99% of the country's cotton is grown, the term "agent" has become a byword for cheating. "Cheating comes in various forms &#8211; at the weighing scales, half payments, delays in payments, price manipulations," says Ngurime.

"When we come to sell our cotton at village centres, the agents weigh our cotton and, after weighing, when the cotton is packed on the truck, they tell us they have run out of cash and our payments will have to be postponed," explains Francis Mangu, a farmer in Nyangukolwa village in Bariadi, in the Shinyanga cotton growing region near Lake Victoria.
Cotton is one of Tanzania's key crops. Around 2 million of the country's 42 million people depend on it for their livelihood. It provides around 13% of the country's foreign exchange &#8211; second only to coffee in agricultural exports. Yet the 400,000 smallholder farmers have seen little improvement in their lives.

"We have to confront this reality that grassroots people engaged in cotton growing have not been able to reduce poverty levels," says Yohana Balele, Shinyanga regional commissioner. He says that while the crop has made a significant contribution to the economy since independence, "poverty levels among [farmers] are still at 42%. Our hope has always been that this is the crop to bail out households from poverty. But, like many other programmes, the challenge is how to achieve this."

The deficiencies of the cotton industry are bound up with the poverty of the farmers. With no savings, and paltry and uncertain returns, they cannot afford pesticides and fertilisers to improve the quality of their cotton. The result is that Tanzanian cotton trades at a discount on the international market due to its lower quality. And since the liberalisation of the cotton industry in the 1990s, productivity has fallen sharply, with yields of around 550kg per hectare &#8211; just over a quarter of the world average.

One of the reasons productivity has not improved is that there has not been enough research into high-yield seed varieties, says Colin Poulton, a research fellow at the Centre for Development, Environment and Policy at the School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas) in London. "To give you an idea, UK82 [a seed variety created in 1982] was still being used in the 2000s," he says. "There was no new level of technology in the seeds."

In addition, there has been no system to provide credit to farmers for fertiliser. "Without credit, farmers can't afford fertiliser," adds Poulton. "In a survey in 2002, we found that 50% of farmers weren't even spraying their crop once. One spray costs $3. It is hard for us to understand that level of poverty."

Low productivity and falling global cotton prices over the past 15 years have actually made farmers poorer.
With fluctuating global prices and increasingly poor returns, Ngurime has opted to grow other crops &#8211; maize and peanuts &#8211; alongside his cotton.

Tanzania's cotton board has announced that from December this year, when farmers start to plant their cotton again, a new type of "contract" farming will be rolled out. "Contract farming", introduced by the UK-based charity the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, establishes direct contracts between farmers and ginneries, removing the agent from the process. Farmers' business groups will replace the agents.

As part of the contract, the ginneries provide the farmers with "inputs" &#8211; such as fertilisers, pesticides, seeds, and tractors to plough the fields &#8211; to improve the amount and quality of cotton grown. The challenge is in the implementation. "Farmers need to be organised to deal with ginners &#8211; and assisting 300,000-plus farmers to coalesce into functioning groups is a huge task," Poulton explains. "The process of 'allocating' ginners to zones &#8230; has to be transparent and seen to be fair, so that ginners will have confidence in the new system."

Farmers who took part in the contract farming pilot are already seeing better harvests and returns. Dotto Fadhili, 60, the head of Nyangukolwa village in Shinyanga, made TShs 800,000 ($470) this year, thanks to fertiliser, better seed and advice provided by the contract farming model. Previously, the most he had made from farming cotton was TShs 300,000. He now wants to expand the 2.4 hectares (6 acres) he planted last year to 4 hectares. "I also wish to buy a Bajaj [motorised rickshaw] with a trailer to haul cotton from the farm to the market," he says. "I will also use the Bajaj to transport people and increase my income. I am on the right path to becoming a commercial farmer."

&#8226; Orton Kiishweko is a staff reporter for the Daily News in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Our Politicians get rid of fully fledged Unions by the name of tribalism; then in the 60's the Unions used to be very helpful to local farmers; they used to get low interest credits and they used to prosper good example was in Kagera, Kilimanjaro and Nyanza Areas

Nowadays our Unions are part of the ruling party organ to provide votes and a tool to siphon local farmers wealth